Sunday, June 13, 2010

2010 BBM Rookie Edition

I'm playing catchup on BBM's sets so far this year...

Back in February, BBM published their annual Rookie Edition set. This set contains cards of players taken in last fall's NPB draft (the 2010 draft, even though it took place in October 2009). The set contains 114 cards, 81 of which are for players taken in the draft (including this year's hot prospect - Yusei Kikuchi). I've mocked this set in the past for being made up primarily of pictures of guys wearing uniform jerseys of their suits doing "guts" poses - one hand raised with a clenched fist. While this year's poses do include a lot of these, there seems to be a little more variety than in the past. There are a lot of guys doing pantomime pitching and batting, several guys with both hands raised, and a couple that I'm not exactly sure what they're doing. And then there's Takehiro Fukuda of the BayStars doing this (card #046):

I'm not sure if Yuji Arahari (#055) is doing some sort of martial art or if he's about to cast as spell...

There are some straight, normal poses in the set, like this one of Yusei Kikuchi (#067):

The set also contains 24 cards of current players (2 per team, a pitcher and a position player) showing pictures of them when they were rookies. Here's Shingo Ono's card (#102):

There's also a five card subset (which look vaguely like the 1992 Upper Deck set) showing each of the new team managers as they appeared as players. Here's BayStars manager Takao Obano from when he was with the Swallows (#107):

Finally, there are four cards for players who changed teams over the winter - Shugo Fujii, Kenji Johjima, Kimyasu Kudoh and Naoyuki Shimizu. Here's Johjima's card (#112), featuring him in a "guts" pose: